Cognitive Planning in Persuasive Multimodal Communication – CoPains

The general objective of the CoPains project is to develop an artificial agent which is capable of: (i) inferring the cognitive and affective states of the human user from her observable behaviors, (ii) influencing and persuading the human user to believe something and/or to behave in a certain way, and (iii) interacting with the human user through multimodal communication including textual expressions, facial expressions and gestures. The envisaged applications are in the area of caregiver assistance for elderly people and nutrition in which an artificial system such as an embodied conversational agent (ECA) has to take care of the user's health and wellbeing. In order to achieve its objectives, CoPains is expected to exploit theoretical and empirical approaches by combining, in a rather innovative way, corpus-based analysis with formal methods from different areas of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes logic, planning, sentiment analysis, and data-mining.